President Donald Trump’s plans to offer tariff relief to various industries being harmed by his haphazard and destructive trade war seems like overwhelming proof that this was a disastrous, ill-conceived idea from the beginning.
The Trump administration has floated the idea of offering farmers subsidies (essentially, government welfare being proposed by the purportedly anti-welfare party) to help them cope with rising costs and foreign nations pulling back on purchasing American-made goods. And on Tuesday, Trump signed two executive orders shielding automakers from some tariffs and allowing them to apply for relief over the next two years — although some experts say that won’t be long enough. Trump also exempted some electronic devices from tariffs earlier this month, though his administration says those exemptions will only be temporary.
It’s as if Trump has blown several holes in the U.S. economy and he’s trying to plug them all with his fingers to stop it from leaking out.
It’s as if Trump has blown several holes in the U.S. economy and he’s trying to plug them all with his fingers to stop it from leaking out. And his varying justifications for why the tariffs are supposedly necessary means there’s no telling when this trade war against the rest of the world will end.
For example, Trump has claimed that tariffs — at least on China, Mexico and Canada — were about stemming the flow of fentanyl into the United States. He has absurdly said that tariffs are about raising revenue to replace the federal income tax. And he has argued that tariffs are about bringing manufacturing back to the United States in a sizable way — even though economists say they will do no such thing.
And all of these justifications appear meaningless at the moment, given that the tariffs don’t seem to be forcing countries into the quick negotiations the president and his Cabinet have said would arise. Trump promised that dozens of trade deals would come to fruition before his 90-day pause on tariffs comes to a close, and, as of this writing, not a single one has been announced. Meanwhile, some experts expect to see the worst impacts in the months ahead. Things clearly aren’t going as the Trump administration had anticipated, and the fact the president is offering relief (however insufficient) from the pain he is single-handedly inflicting on American businesses is a sure sign of that.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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